- Something that I’ve been using for almost a year
now is something very simple yet very effective. Enforcing the
sub-domain of www. While some of you may consider this to be a basic
principal while running your site, others may have not known about
it.
- Enforcing WWW
First, before being able to use this code, you need to make sure
your webserver (normally Apache) has mod_rewrite compiled into it.
Next, after verifying that, put the following code into a file
called .htaccess in the root of your site (normally something like
/home/username/public_html/.htaccess)
- What will this code do for me?
When other sites link to your site, they may
or may not include the www in your domain name. This causes a
problem for search engines because they now see http://mydomain.com
and http://www.mydomain.com To a search engine, sub-domains are
completely different domains than the primary domain. When looking
at a site, such as Google.com, you will see that when you visit
http://google.com is actually forwards you to
http://www.google.com
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- RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}
!^mydomain.com$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1
[R=301,QSA,L]
So in short, you are forcing
everyone to look at just one domain name instead of two.
Why does a search engine consider
a sub-domain different than the primary domain?
This part is simple. WWW is considered a sub-domain because
that’s exactly what it is. The world has come to know the
Internet as the World Wide Web and always thought to add the www
in front of a domain name, but in reality, it’s just a
sub-domain of the primary domain.
How will setting this help my search rankings?
Adding this bit of code to your site will let
search engines know which domain you are actually using and
which one they need to be giving “strength” to for search
results.
Personal note:
I do this for all of my sites to ensure that I can get the
highest possible rankings.
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